How to Learn and Remember New Ideas

When I started writing science fiction nearly eight years ago, I found myself collecting large amounts of information and organizing it into chunks and filing it. Later I would use this material in stories by creating a list of points I wanted to make. If a topic caught my interest, I'd follow up with a search on the key word, looking for additional resources. Often, I'd have a question I wanted answered, and I'd specifically seek out a reference that covered that information. Since many of us have left school long ago, this article by Sadie F. Dingfelder provides some tips about how to learn how to learn. And Jack Devine explains more about self-directed learning for those producing education materials.

My activities followed the pattern of memorization organization: intend, file including the suggestion to make a chart, and rehearse. [1] One way to know if you have a complete understanding of a topic is to check the various information resources to see if they provide a different set of information.

There are many charts that can represent the information. One thing to remember is that short-term memory and a short attention span limits the amount of data we can easily assess at a given time to five to nine ideas, thoughts, words, or anything of a type. Use that limit to create a simple diagram. Any representation, a set of conventions used to describe a class of things[2], will do as long as it supports your understanding and later use of the information. In fact, the popularity of Visio software derives from it's support of many different forms of representations including organization charts, hierarchical trees, Venn diagrams, process models, etc. Note: the importance of building a model doesn't depend on the completeness or precision of the model in reflecting reality. In the examples below, I have not attempted to provide complete process models.

I prefer to use a process diagram because the underlying process activity can be hidden.. That processing can be depicted in whatever form is most suitable to the activity or data.

For the two examples used below see: